


The Other Side of the Noose

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Ghost Stories (in a Shadowhunter World) [2]
Category: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Series - Mackenzi Lee, The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst, Character Death, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Charlotte shows up for two seconds, Death, Ghost Monty, Ghost Percy, Ghosts, Hand injury, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Moving On, POV Percy Newton, Sick Jem Carstairs, Still canon compliant for TID but not for TGGTVAV, Vomiting, Will is Will, hangings, have i covered all my bases yet, in the ghost sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 11:23:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21898453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Percy can’t help it.  It’s instinct to say it at this point.  “Please be gentle with that.  It’s very precious to me.”You’d have thought he was a ghoul, for how high Will jumps.  “Bloody hell!” he cries, twisting around.  “Don’t scare me like that!”He’s looking right at Percy, there’s no denying it.  “You can hear me?” Percy asks, just to make sure.“Of course I can!  Jesus, do you go around scaring all the handsome young lads?  How long have you beeninthere?”Grinning, Percy tells him.  He hasn’t spoken to another soul and gotten a response back in, oh… must be a hundred years.  The last words he spoke that another human could hear were to the executioner who hung him—telling the man to stop messing around with last words and just do it already.  Percy introduces himself to Will, and to Jem, and then Will says the most wonderful thing—he says he was looking for Percy’s violin.  And when Percy asks why… when he asks why, Will says that he knows someone who wants to see him.AKA a companion fic to The Place Where Headstones Have No Names, this time from Percy's POV.
Relationships: Henry "Monty" Montague/Percy Newton, Jem Carstairs & Will Herondale
Series: Ghost Stories (in a Shadowhunter World) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579357
Comments: 16
Kudos: 44





	The Other Side of the Noose

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Place Where Headstones Have No Names](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21870736) by [pinstripedJackalope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope). 

> I had to do it. My hand was forced. Forgive me.

Percy Newton knows terror. He’s been in the crypt of a Venetian island as it sank, all at once, into the lagoon. He’s been held at gunpoint by highwaymen on the search for something stolen from them. He has, more than once, clutched at the love of his life as that love lost consciousness, once poisoned and once shot, not knowing either time if they would ever open their eyes again. He’s experienced fits and deaths and manhunts and pirates, and he’d even go so far as to say that he’s become accustomed to it all. He’s survived all of it, after all—he survived the sinking island and the highwaymen and he was able to hold the love of his life once again, after that love blinked awake once more.

So Percy Newton knows terror. What he’s never had to know, however… what he’s never once felt… is complete and utter _hopelessness_. 

Not until now, anyway.

***

“One letter—one single letter, that’s all I ask,” Monty is saying through the bars of the prison cell. His voice is hoarse—he’s been asking, begging, pleading for an hour already. He hasn’t stopped, has hardly slowed, not even enough to eat the meager portions of food the guards shoved through the hole in the door.

Percy keeps his head down, pretending he’s not listening to Monty’s high, desperate voice. There is no way to call upon Felicity or Scipio—no chance that they’d get here in time even if there was. They’ve been here for two weeks, long enough that Percy’s bloody knuckles have mostly healed. Long enough that Percy's eyes have adjusted to the dimness of the cell and even the meager sunlight that comes in through the barred windows hurts. Long enough that Percy has realized that the prison guards aren’t going to give Monty the pen and paper with which to write a letter. 

And yet. Monty has it in his head that if they can just get a letter out, one letter, they’ll be saved. “I’ll give you anything you ask for,” he says, clinging to the bars. “Just state your price—I’ll get it to you.”

The guard laughs. This one is genial, compared to the one yesterday. The one yesterday had spit in Monty’s face when he started up. Still, Monty’s pleading is only entertaining for so long before it starts to grow annoying, and Percy knows what will happen when the guard gets bored of it.

Just as expected, the flip comes soon after that. “Enough of that. Shut it, pervert,” the guard spits suddenly, kicking at the place where Monty is clutching the cell bars. Monty yelps, flinching back—but not fast enough. The guard’s boot catches his fingers, and he curls around them, hissing.

Percy waits until the guard has paced down to the far end of the cellblock before he huddles up against the bars erected between them, reaching for Monty. “Come here,” he says. Monty is too far for him to get more than a small handful of his shirtsleeve, but that’s enough. Percy latches on and tugs until Monty shuffles closer, his hurt hand cradled against his chest. “Here, let me see.”

Monty glances at the guard, his eyes so wide and blue, tears pooling in them, before he lowers his hand. 

Two of his fingers are bent wrong. Broken. Percy swallows hard, his hands hovering over the wounds. He doesn’t know what to do. They can’t ask for help—they’re here waiting their turn to be hanged, they won’t be allowed a doctor. Felicity… Percy swallows again. Felicity would know what to do. But Felicity isn’t here—it’s just Percy. And he knows that he isn’t enough.

***

Another week. Another week of Monty looking thinner and thinner, his face paler and paler, his eyes growing fever bright as he pleads with the guards. His fingers are stiff and swollen, bruised nearly black—the only thing he can do is hug his hand to his chest, nursing the broken bones. He moans, at night, sleeping fitfully, the fever high. To hear him and not be able to wrap an arm around him, to _hold_ him… it’s almost too much. Percy cries silent tears in the cover of the darkness, reaching, always reaching, never finding what his hands are searching for. Those nights are the worst.

The days, on the other hand, are made of routine. Breakfast is served at the same time every day, passed through the hole in the door on a thin tin plate. Percy forces himself to eat, forces Monty to eat, then listens as Monty sets about his begging. Monty, too dizzy to stay upright for long, gives up a little earlier, a little sooner, every day. He apologizes to Percy, who tells him that he did his best. They then lay side by side, the bars between them, until dinner arrives. Percy forces himself to eat again, tries not to listen as Monty heaves up the few bites he got down, and encourages Monty to rest.

But today… today is different. Instead of a breakfast of stale bread, the guards give them nothing but hard grins. Monty is lying, listless, on his back. He doesn’t move, his lidded eyes staring at the ceiling, until the guard unlocks his cell door and grabs him roughly by the arm, hauling him up. “Please—” he says then, holding his broken hand to his chest. 

The guard pays him no mind, forcing his hand down and behind his back. Monty shudders, his entire body jerking in the guard’s grip. Percy can’t watch, but neither can he tear his eyes away. He grips the bars between them, crying out, “Stop, stop that, he’s hurt, can’t you _see_?”

The guard pays him no mind, either. Monty sobs as the guard binds his hands behind his back with rope. Then they’re walking, the guard pushing Monty until he stumbles out of the cell and starts, knees shaking, down the block. 

A moment too late, Percy realizes that they’re not taking him, as well. He feels like he’s been torn right down the middle, half of him panicked and reeling and half of him frozen in place, both halves deadened with a dread so intense that he can barely watch as Monty is lead away. He can’t watch, he can’t… but there is no alternative. No alternative except throwing himself against the bars, calling out, screaming, his voice pitched high with desperation. 

Monty doesn’t stop. He can’t. He looks back once, a small, sickly-looking smile on his face, before stepping through the far door and out of sight.

That is the last time Percy sees Monty alive.

***

They wait what feels like an eternity before they come back for Percy. Percy grits his teeth as they bind his hand behind his back just like they did to Monty before him. The sunlight is blinding when they get outside, even through the clouds. Percy blinks his eyes closed for a long moment, wincing, before he forces them open again. He stares up at the sky as he’s lead to the gallows at the back of the building, ignoring the small, jeering crowd that has cumulated there to watch. 

He feels, as he walks, as if he’s been sitting in the cold so long that he’s stopped shivering. Numbness has set in—he knows, factually, that Monty has already faced the gallows. That he’s all alone now. That he's walking toward the end of his life. He knows that the love of his life is gone already, hanged from the neck until dead. He knows there’s no chance of being saved, has known it for weeks. He’s glad, in a sense, that Monty is no longer suffering of the broken bones, the infection and the fever. He’s glad that a hanging is a relatively quick death. No prolonged suffering… no, not today…

Percy stumbles. He can hardly feel his feet. The sky is cloudy, a regular London day. Not too horribly cold, not too bright, not rainy or windy or lightless. It’s as good a day as any to die. 

He almost laughs. Felicity, Scipio, Ebrahim, Georgie… none of them will know what happened to the two of them. They have no idea that Monty is gone already. That Percy is alone. That Percy is following in Monty’s footsteps, walking up to the noose. Absolutely no idea. 

It’s almost enough to rattle Percy from the numbness, but… no, it’s better to be numb. He sinks back into it, pausing for just a moment to spare a perfunctory thought to his aunt and uncle. Would they care that he’s being led to his death? They had no children of their own, no other heirs. Not that he was a very good heir, after everything. The epilepsy and the asylum and the running away from the asylum… no, Percy was never good for them. Trapped in an asylum for the rest of his life or hanged by the neck until dead, it’s all probably the same to them.

“Walk, prisoner,” the guard grunts, and Percy realizes that he had nearly stopped in the middle of the path. The gallows have started to encroach on his view of the sky, the seemingly massive beams holding up the noose looming over him. They’re so large… Percy can hardly imagine Monty—small, _delicate_ Monty—walking fearlessly up to them. But he had. He’d probably taken it all in stride, gritting his teeth and giving the guards that dimpled smile and smart tongue right up until the end. 

A tear falls, and Percy jerks, realizing that he’s crying. His chest hitches and the guard pushes him until he mounts the stairs, one shaking foot at a time. The numbness is pushing up against something huge that has bubbled up inside him—anger or loss or some other similar thing, a flood of emotion deep inside. They are warring within him, the numbness and the emotion, and he can hardly see for the tears. His hands shake, and he knows, finally, what it feels like to want to be dead. He tried to imagine it, back when Monty first admitted to him that he craved death, but he never quite understood. Not until now. Not until this very moment, as his body threatens to burst apart at the seams to make way for the pure grief locked inside him.

He wants to die. He wants to die. He wants it all to be _over already_. A world without Monty is the worst thing he could ever imagine, and that is his reality, so please, god, let it be _over_.

He walks up to the noose and stares the executioner in the eye, daring him to tighten the knot already.

***

Percy always believed in heaven and hell. It was hard not to, surrounded always by the motifs of the church that his aunt and uncle took him to every Sunday. It seemed, to him, like a fair system—you did bad things and you suffered for eternity, or you did good things and you thrived forever in paradise. It wasn’t until he grew older and started questioning what was truly good and what was truly bad that his faith began to falter. Maybe, he thought, there was nothing after death. No reward and no punishment. Just the abyss.

Still… heaven, hell, or a great, vast nothingness… whatever awaited him, he figured he’d be ready. He’s had an entire lifetime to prepare, after all.

That said, when he opens his eyes, all alone, and sees the flat that he and Monty had shared up until their imprisonment and subsequent deaths, the first thought he has is that the devil is a lot craftier than he’d previously given him credit for. Giving him his life back but this time without Monty was the absolute worst thing that Percy could possibly imagine, and yet…

He stares around, hoping against hope that Monty is on his way. That he’ll saunter around the corner from the tiny washroom and give Percy a kiss on the cheek like he always does, turning this hell into heaven with that one sweet act.

It doesn’t happen. Because, as Percy comes to realize, this isn’t heaven. But neither, comes the next realization, is it hell. He figures that out slowly, as he stretches his hands out before him and sees his bones through his ghostly skin. He is dead, that is for certain, but he isn’t in an afterlife—he is a ghost, his body left behind and his spirit bound, as far as he can tell, to walk this Earth for all eternity.

***

The first day, despite not being in hell, is nothing short of torture. The hope that Monty will appear has wilted and withered down to nothing. The apartment is empty aside from Percy. There is no one here.

Percy spends the day sitting beside his violin, hunched over and avoiding the sunlight from the minuscule window. Every time the sunlight hits him, his form wavers, and he fears that he’ll disappear if he’s struck by a beam of it straight on. 

It feels like an eternity, sitting alone, waiting for night to fall. But fall it does, and Percy rises to his feet. His muscles seem like they should be stiff from sitting still all day but they’re not—he moves as easy and as limber as ever. He has no more need to worry about stretching. He does it anyway, just because he’s used to it, before he sets his shoulders and begins to walk.

At the door to the apartment, he finds that there is a tug, almost a yearning inside him, drawing him back inside. He shrugs his shoulders and forces himself forward, heading down the steps of the apartment building. He has to find Monty, he has to—but with each step, the tug becomes more pronounced, until it’s like a hook in his gut, all but _dragging_ him backward. He tries to breathe through the pain but it hurts _so bad_ and he has no breath to use. He shudders, his body folding. But he has to—Monty—he _needs to find Monty_—

He can’t. One last step and all at once the world around him tears open, the street before him dissolving like acid. The rends race toward him and he flinches, stumbling back, but the destruction is already upon him, swallowing him whole.

He opens his eyes to the flat. It’s just as it was when he left it, as if he never left at all. The screen dividing the kitchen and the front room is still there, the clothes on the floor unmoving, the violin sitting in its case just the same as it has been ever since his arrival.

“I’m… I’m trapped,” he says aloud, realization crashing down. He can’t go find Monty because there is something holding him here, tying him to this place. He cannot leave. All he can do… is wait.

So he does. He waits, and waits, and waits as the sun and moon chase each other around the earth and the neighbors' voices rise and ebb like the tide. Sometimes he stands and wanders the apartment, his hands slipping through his and Monty’s belongings as if he isn’t there at all. But he is, he _is_ there, he knows he is—and if he can just figure out what’s holding him here maybe he can _escape_.

So he searches. And searches. And just when he’s starting to lose hope, he hears a key in the lock. 

It’s the landlord. Letting in a bunch of men. They are wearing plain clothes but Percy recognizes them all the same—they are police officers and prison guards, the very same ones who took Monty and Percy from the front of the tavern and kept them locked away. There’s the one who Percy punched in the face, and there’s the one who broke Monty’s hand, and Percy feels rage inside him rising and rising and rising as they come in as if they own the place, putting their disgusting hands all over everything. Percy tries to shove them away, to claw their faces, but his hands just go through them. He tries and tries until the rage comes pouring from his mouth and he _screams_ at them. He can barely hear the words on his own tongue.

“Stop touching things! Go away! Be gone from here, you foul, vile _monsters_—”

The monsters in question don’t even blink in his direction. They take and they take and they take, dismantling Percy’s life right in front of his ghostly eyes, and there is nothing he can do about it. He screams and shouts and cries and still no one hears until finally there is nothing left but the furniture and the floors and, though he doesn’t understand why, his violin. Then they take that, too, and he with it.

***

From there his journey is slow and winding. He finds himself in a pawn shop first, waiting with apprehension as patrons approached the fiddle on the shelf. He tries to warn them away, to bare his teeth and scare them off, but still, no one seems to notice him standing there. He endures dozens of hands pawing all over his father’s fiddle, picking it up and plucking discordant, untuned notes and feels again that _rage_, of a sort that he had never felt in life. He wants to rip them apart, all of them, into little, tiny pieces—

He steps back, horror filling his chest until it bubbles up his throat. They’re just people, some of them just _children_, how could he feel such animosity for them? These aren’t the monsters who tore him from Monty. They aren’t police officers or prison guards or the damned Duke of Bourbon. They aren’t anyone.

Still, he feels an incredible protectiveness rising over him as he watches his fiddle pass from hand to hand. He begs, pleads, for them to be gentle. He doesn’t know what would happen to him if the violin were somehow broken, if it would free him from his tether or annihilate his spirit altogether, but he can’t take the chance that he’d be ripped from this earth and flung somewhere into the ether. He needs to find Monty. That’s all he can think, even as the violin sits in the display case, dust growing on its surface, the hairs of the bow coming loose from their glue due to the neglect of the shop owner. He just… he needs to find Monty.

_He needs to find Monty_.

***

The person who buys the violin, after several years spent waiting, is a tall, thin man with a dark beard. He raises it to his chin right there in the shop and Percy flinches, but… the plucked notes are true. It’s just a series of scales but it’s the first time in a long while that someone who actually knew what they were doing touched the fiddle. Percy hums along with the notes, delighted by an arpeggio, and then watches with wide eyes as the man sets the violin on the counter and starts haggling for it.

After the bow is fixed and the violin properly tuned, the man plays the violin regularly. Every Tuesday and Thursday he sits before a warm fire and pulls out sheets of music, placing bow to string and playing. Percy, who has long since discovered that he can sort of disappear and reappear at will, spends most of his time hidden in the violin. Until the man plays, that is. He comes out for that, and it’s pleasant. 

At first.

Years go by, and Percy realizes with a start that the spaces between practices are getting longer and longer. Sometimes the man, now with a beard streaked in gray, doesn’t play for weeks at a time. Longer and longer Percy goes without manifesting, and though he has a hard time keeping track of time he notices all at once that years have become decades and though he himself has stayed exactly the same as the day he died, the man has grown old. His hands, wizened and arthritic, can barely hold the instrument.

Eventually comes a time when Percy realizes that he’s been hidden away for a very long time indeed. He manifests himself, his energy coalescing into the shape of a body. 

He’s in an attic. Storage, stowed away among trunks and boxes. And there he stays for what feels like ages, hidden away inside the violin, waiting for someone else to pick it up though it feels like they never, ever will. All the way up until a man, a different man, digs the fiddle case free of all the boxes and hands it over to a young woman who is as small as a child.

***

Charlotte, Percy learns, is the woman’s name. He also learns fairly quickly that she’s… different… from most people. He can’t quite put his finger on what it is that separates her from what she calls ‘mundanes’—is it the odd tattoos adorning her arms and chest? Is it the sharpness in her eyes?—but he knows there’s _something_. He watches from the depths of the violin as she marches down long hallways and past tapestries woven in the image of an angel rising from a lake and finally arrives at a room, a room where a young boy with black hair and black eyes lays curled up in bed.

“James… I have a present for you,” Charlotte says. The boy, maybe twelve years old, lifts his head. Percy watches, wary, as the boy then pushes himself up and crawls toward the woman. He’s small, hesitant, his hands shaky. Up close Percy realizes that his features are like those of the Chinese sailors who used to go spend their earnings at Monty’s casino.

Monty… Percy pushes through the tug of longing that curls through him at the name. He wants to see what will happen now, with the boy and the violin.

“I heard you like music,” Charlotte continues, setting the violin down on the bed between them. “I thought you might like to try playing something.”

The boy sits for a long time, saying nothing and not moving. He looks sick, Percy realizes with a lurch—he has the same sort of look about him that Percy himself had after fits. Percy feels his heart soften, the rage that came so easily whenever someone new touched his violin swallowed slowly back down.

“Go on,” Charlotte says, encouraging. The boy looks up at her, biting his lip… then he slowly unclasps the case and lifts the violin free.

He’s not skilled. Not like the man was. He doesn’t know where to place his fingers, how to hold the bow and the neck of the instrument. But he draws the bow across an open E string and the note rattles through Percy in a way that none have before, and then the boy is smiling and Charlotte is resting her hand on his head and Percy knows that this is the second-best thing that could possibly ever happen to him. To get to watch a child learn to play is second only to finding Monty once again.

***

The boy grows, and as he does, Percy learns that the illness he suffers from is less of an illness and more of an addiction. The silver powder that James Carstairs—Jem, they begin to call him—lets dissolve on his tongue every morning is a drug that he cannot be weaned from, one that is killing him slowly. As Jem grows, Percy watches his hair and eyes take on a silver tint, growing stronger and stronger year by year until he is as silvered and ghost-like as Percy himself. 

There’s another boy who comes into Jem’s rooms sometimes, but Percy, hidden in the violin, doesn’t much care for him. He listens as the two of them speak of things he’s never known existed—Downworlders and Shadowhunters and Mundanes—and as he does he realizes that the alchemical heart he encountered while he was alive was just one drop of magic in an entire hidden ocean. He wonders if Monty knows what the Nephilim are, wherever he is. He wonders if Monty ever sees a silver-gilt boy coughing blood and wishes there was some way to help. 

There is no helping, though. Jem is sick, dying, and Percy has to be content with the fact that when Jem plays his violin the tension drains from his shoulders and the pinch of pain drops from his face. Jem is so gentle, so loving, always playing slow, sad songs…

Percy waits until the other boy, Will, has gone away and then manifests at Jem’s elbow. He sits on the bed beside Jem, his ghostly form not wrinkling the covers even a little, and listens, the longing for Monty growing and growing and growing. It hurts so_ much_. The longing soars with the music, and Percy cries as the notes drift right through him, the ache inconsolable.

***

Another year and Jem becomes a _parabatai_, a blood brother, with Will. Percy knows that though they were not shadowhunters, he and Monty were as close as _parabatai_. If only Monty were here, Percy could tell him how much he’s missed him. How the ache of absence leaves him weak and cold, with barely the strength to manifest. He’s too weak, too drawn and sad—he stops manifesting at all and just listens to the music when the music comes, wondering what he’ll do, where he’ll go, when Jem dies.

Until, that is, Will and Jem leave for a night and come back with a different violin.

Percy stirs, listening. They’re acting odd, saying something about a Sight rune. He doesn’t understand—there is a lot he doesn’t understand about shadowhunters. They’re such odd people, with their steles and their runes and their seraph blades. 

Right now, for instance. They’re talking to the other violin. Percy hears Jem’s voice, softly asking if anyone is there. There’s nothing, as far as Percy can sense, but he’s been wrong before. He’s been wrong about so many things. 

Still, he listens harder, his curiosity piqued. Even more so, he realizes, when Jem reaches down to pick up _his_ fiddle and sets it on the bed.

“…You know, I never did ask where Charlotte found this. It’s old—that’s all I know,” Jem says, and Percy perks up, silently manifesting in the room. He’s behind Will and Jem, he finds, who are both staring at his fiddle. Will reaches forward to grab the instrument and—

Percy can’t help it. It’s instinct to say it at this point. “Please be gentle with that. It’s very precious to me.”

You’d have thought he was a ghoul, for how high Will jumps. “Bloody hell!” he cries, twisting around. “Don’t scare me like that!”

He’s looking right at Percy, there’s no denying it. “You can hear me?” Percy asks, just to make sure. 

“Of course I can! Jesus, do you go around scaring all the handsome young lads? How long have you been _in_ there?”

Grinning, Percy tells him. He hasn’t spoken to another soul and gotten a response back in, oh… must be a hundred years. The last words he spoke that another human could hear were to the executioner who hung him—telling the man to stop messing around with last words and just do it already. Percy introduces himself to Will, and to Jem, and then Will says the most wonderful thing—he says he was looking for Percy’s violin. And when Percy asks why… when he asks why, Will says that he knows someone who wants to see him.

***

Hearing confirmation that Monty is still here on this Earth pierces through Percy like the sun, piercing through the clouds. He feels a rush of bright hope in his chest, damn near lifting him off his feet. He no longer feels weak and sad. He feels like he can stay manifested for the next hundred years. He’s going to see Monty. _He__’s going to see Monty_.

Of course, Will has to knock him down a peg, first. “We can’t go tonight,” he says, dismissive. “It’s too close to morning. Tomorrow night, we’ll go.”

Percy looks from him to Jem and back again, but Jem is looking wan and tired and Will is insistent. "Fine," Percy says. It can’t be helped—if he must wait then wait he will. One more day. He’s spent a hundred years waiting, what’s another day? He shakes his head.

Then, a nervous energy thrumming through him, he sets to pacing across the space at the foot of Jem’s bed, listening as Jem sleeps. Silent, gliding footfalls take him from one stone wall to the other, with a pause every few steps to look at the shadowhunters lying in the bed. Will, he suspects, is still awake and likely watching him, too still on the bed to be truly under, but Percy couldn’t care less. He has to smother a smile, equal parts anxious and excited, into his hand. He’s going to see Monty. Monty!

The antsy, anxious energy doesn’t abate by the time Jem wakes again. Percy watches this time as Will carefully uses a stele to redraw the Sight rune on Jem’s hand. His own arms are crossed over his chest to keep them from tapping out an anxious rhythm. It seems like time has slowed to a crawl, each tick of the clock taking an hour to ring across the room. It’s been a hundred years but these eighteen hours feel like the longest Percy has ever waited.

Jem, thankfully, comes to his rescue. “Did you play?” he asks, settling cross-legged on his bed. Will, beside him, groans and flops backward, his feet on Jem’s pillow and his hat over his face.

Percy starts. “Play?” he asks. Jem tips his head toward the violin. “Oh! Yes. Ever since I was old enough to hold a fiddle I’ve played.”

A wry smile plays at Jem’s lips. “In that case, I apologize sincerely. It must have been difficult to watch someone so inexperienced pluck at the strings.”

“To be honest, watching you learn to play was actually quite delightful. You picked up vibrato much faster than I did when I was first learning. You have very sure hands. Is it because you’re a shadowhunter?”

Jem laughs, a delightful sound. “I suppose so.”

“And the music! It’s changed a lot in the last hundred years. It’s always delightful to hear you play a new piece.”

“I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. I do like Ysaye, myself—his use of atmosphere makes his pieces a delight to play.”

“Yes! It reminds me of a sea shanty that I learned from a pirate once.”

Jem’s eyes go wide. “A pirate? That sounds very exciting. You must tell me that story.”

So Percy does, starting from the beginning. He speaks about growing up with Monty and the trouble they’d get into, Monty’s expulsion from Eton and the introduction of their Tour, Monty’s final chance to get himself together before returning to his father to help run the estate. And of course, from the mention of the Tour comes their adventure thereof, the Baseggio box and the Duke of Bourbon and the great chase across the continent—

“—It was, of course, a mixed blessing. Danger all the way, but also a chance to escape the asylum that awaited me at the end of our Tour,” Percy says. He sighs wistfully. Monty is a better storyteller than he ever was, but the story still sets Percy’s sense of longing alight. Longing for better times, for companionship and hope and…

“You were to be put away in an asylum?” Jem asks softly, drawing Percy back from his thoughts.

“Whatever for?” Will demands. He’s sat up again, his face gleeful. “Have you got a secret second personality that’s going to flip on us and attack?”

“No, nothing like that,” Percy sighs. “I had… fits.”

“Fits of madness? Fits of _murderous intent_?”

Percy shakes his head, looking down. “No, not—fits as in seizures.”

Will deflates, his interest waning. Jem, on the other hand, has grown soft and reflective, his face masked with compassion. “They’d send you to an asylum for that? Really?” Will asks, a disinterested disdain in his voice.

It’s hard, even now, a hundred years beyond death, to speak of his illness. To admit how hard it was, the stigma surrounding it, the curse of being sent away to an asylum for his own good…

“You’ve been through a lot,” comes Jem’s voice, breaking through the memories once again. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“Thank you,” Percy says softly. “…It might come as little consolation, but I’m sorry, as well.”

Jem smiles a sad smile that aches in Percy’s chest the same way that Monty’s last smile did. “We’ve all got our burdens.”

***

The hour hand edges around the twelve on the face of the clock and the afternoon wears on. Sophie, a servant, knocks on Jem’s bedroom door to ask if he’ll be down for lunch. He says no, claiming a headache. She leaves a bowl of soup for him outside the door. He and Will share it, taking turns sipping the savory broth.

Percy, despite himself, is thankful that the boys haven’t left the room. He’s not sure what he’d do if he was left alone at this juncture in time—he thinks, nonsensically, that he’d stop existing. If there was no one to look at him and prove that he’s actually there, would he even exist? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear… it would be tantalizing, to be so close to finally seeing Monty only to dematerialize into nothingness. 

“…I’d like to play something for you, if that’s all right,” Jem says. He’s standing now, just by the closed curtains of the window, his silver eyes watching Percy pace back and forth. “Would you allow me to play your father’s violin one more time?”

Percy feels a smile curving across his face. He’s never been asked something so kindly before. He bows his head. “You’ve always been gentle with it. I trust you.”

And so Jem plays. Percy tries not to feel the longing, the yearning, that always rises up at the sound of a bow on strings, but he cannot stop it as it rises up within him once again. From the corner of his eye, he sees Will turn away from Jem, and glances over in time to see a teardrop fall down Will’s cheek. Percy closes his eyes and lets the music flow through him, winding around and around and around his heart, tighter and tighter and tighter.

And then, just like that, it’s time.

The walk through London would, at any other time, have been simply fascinating for Percy. He knew these streets a hundred years past, after all—he’d love to see all the changes, the differences between his London and theirs. Tonight, however, it’s all he can do to keep himself from pushing ahead of Will and Jem and his fiddle. Will keeps rolling his eyes, a habit very like Felicity’s, as if he can’t imagine that anyone would be anxious to see Monty. But Percy is—he’s so very anxious and if pulling at the bond between him and his violin would get them there faster he would pull and pull and pull.

Then they reach a high iron fence, and Percy pauses. There are spirits here—he hasn’t encountered another lost soul until now, and there are so many as to be overwhelming. He’s panicked, for a moment—_how is he meant to find Monty amid all these spirits_?—and petulant another—_why does he have to wait as the shadowhunters pass his violin over the fence_?—but in the end they get him inside the gates. They cross the cemetery and Percy tries to temper his expectations, to keep the hope contained in his chest so that he won’t be disappointed when it’s not Monty, to—

He needn’t have worried. Needn’t have doubted. Because he’s here. Percy passes through a massive crumbling statue in the middle of the cemetery and suddenly Monty is there, right there, not fifty feet away.

Nothing else matters. Not the violin, not Jem and Will, not the clamoring ghosts surrounding them, not the last hundred years that have sloughed past, glacially slow. Time and distance mean nothing as Percy breaks into a run, his feet gliding over cemetery dirt, graceful and silent. “_Monty_!” he says, and Monty’s head whips up, their eyes locking. Percy sees shock and awe on Monty’s face and then he’s up and running, too, breaking into the widest smile that Percy has ever seen. Percy sobs, ectoplasmic tears drifting from his eyes.

They crash together in the middle of a row of headstones, a tangle of limbs and tears and laughter. A hundred years of never quite touching anything around him, of his hands passing through people and objects as if they were nothing more than air… a hundred years spent untouched and alone, alone, alone, and Percy finds that Monty settles in his arms like he was always meant to be there. Percy wraps his arms around Monty’s solid shoulders, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around with the force of his joy. Monty’s hands clutch at his back, digging into his shirt, and it should hurt except it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel bad at all, it feels like being _home_.

Percy sets Monty back on his feet and leans down to press kiss after kiss to his cheeks. “Thank you,” Monty gasps, speaking to the two living figures that Percy has nearly forgotten. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—”

“Stop thanking me,” Will grumbles, but Monty doesn’t stop. Not until Percy nudges a finger under his chin, lifts his face, and kisses him, a kiss illuminated by every single scrap of joy that is trapped inside of him.

They’re together. Finally. And Percy is _never letting go again_.

***

The time after that is a blur. Percy can’t recall anything but Monty’s face, his skin, his clothes and hair and his deep, deep blue eyes. He steals kisses, as many as he can, which turns out to be quite a lot. He has no need to breathe, after all—he can kiss Monty until the world turns and the sun rises in the East.

It’s Monty who pulls back first. “I’ve missed you, you know that?” he says. His eyes are searching, boring into Percy’s. 

Percy nods, raising Monty’s hand and pressing a kiss to each of the fingers that that damn prison guard broke, once upon a time. They’re straight and true now, no sign of the injury at all. “I know,” he says. 

“And you know that I love you?” Monty asks, still searching.

“I know.”

“Do you know that I would have done anything to save you? Anything at all?”

He’s getting choked up, his voice wavering. Percy wraps Monty up in another hug, a softer one, pressing Monty’s face to the crook of his neck. “I know,” he whispers. “_I know_.”

“Good,” Monty says, and then he’s laughing, and crying, and Percy feels like he’s floating in the clouds and rooted to the ground and splitting open and shutting down all at once, all because of the sheer weight of his emotions. 

They stay like that for a long time. Just standing, under the stars, holding each other, until finally Percy admits, “I wish I could play for you.”

Monty hums, nuzzling closer. “I would like that. It’s too bad you can’t.”

Percy sighs. Then an idea comes to him. He slowly loosens his grip on Monty’s shoulders, taking him instead by the hand so that he can ask one final favor of Jem.

Jem, of course, agrees. He opens the fiddle case—_Percy__’s indestructible fiddle case_, Monty whispers with a laugh—and takes out Percy’s fiddle. After a moment, he begins to play.

It’s natural, raising Monty’s hand to draw him close. One hand on his waist, the other holding Monty’s aloft, and Percy begins to lead them in a dance. Step, step, step—and a twirl here, Monty giggling all the while. The music is light and playful, and soon Will’s voice rises, singing along, and as Percy dances he feels his chest expanding with love. He can’t help it—he presses his lips to Monty’s once more, pouring himself into the kiss until it feels like he’s untethered, unmoored, unbound for the first time in a hundred years. He holds Monty’s face between his hands and smiles against his lips and just like that… just like that he lets go.

It’s aching and beautiful all at once. He’s losing himself, all the energy that once coalesced into the shape of him loosening and coming apart. His hands lose their shape, his lips dissolving away against Monty’s. It would be frightening, he thinks, if it weren’t for Monty himself—Monty beaming, his dimples showing, as he, too, separates into a hundred million points of light. Like a sandstorm, a blizzard, they become something more—every fiber of Percy’s being, every single point of light, intertwines with Monty’s until they are one and the same. It’s a flurry of light, the earth falling away beneath them, and then—

They coalesce in the clouds, high above the Earth below. Side by side they stand, looking down and down and down. “Oh,” Monty says, stunned. “It’s beautiful.”

Percy doesn’t know if this is heaven, where he and Monty have wound up. It might be… or it might not be. He’s learned, in the last hundred years, that things aren’t the way he thought they were. Monty is right, though. It’s beautiful. And wherever this is, wherever they are… he’s with Monty, and they’ll be together forever.

**Author's Note:**

> Please check out the end notes on The Place Where Headstones Have No Names if you need clarification on any of the shadowhunter terminology!
> 
> EDIT: I just learned that Jem's violin came with him from Shanghai so this verse is no longer canon-compliant. Rip. Still, it's a fun idea!


End file.
